The website was released on occasion of the 54th Berlin International Film Festival on 11 February 2005. filmportal.de was revised and expanded in 2011/2012.
The database provides information on about 85 000 German cinema and television films (as of June 2015) from 1895 to the present.
About 8 000 films are presented in detail with content descriptions, stills and/or posters.
Moreover, editorial texts link the information with the history of film in the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the GDR.
filmportal.de was established by Deutsches Filminstitut (Frankfurt) in collaboration with CineGraph - Hamburg Center for Research on Film and with support of the other members of the German Kinematheksverbund and the associations of the German film industry.